Purpose: The Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989) was used to compare Italian and English lexical development. The authors addressed the issue of universal versus language-specific aspects of lexical development by testing language, age, and gender effects on vocabulary scores and by comparing vocabulary composition across languages. They addressed the issue of delay versus deviance by comparing vocabulary composition in late talkers and younger vocabulary-size-matched children.
Method: Participants were 398 Italian and 206 U.S. children ages 18-35 months.
Results: Vocabulary size did not differ significantly by language, and age and gender effects on vocabulary size were not moderated by language. The Italian-English Q correlation for percentage word use scores was .55, lower than the within-language concordance of .90 and above. Cross-linguistic concordance declined as age and vocabulary size increased. Many cross-linguistic word matches (63 words) were found among the top 100 words. Italian late talkers were similar to younger vocabulary-size-matched Italian children in vocabulary composition, consistent with findings for English, Greek, and Korean.
Conclusions: In both languages, the early lexicons of late talkers and typical talkers contained many of the same words, indicating considerable universality in young children's lexical development. These common words are therefore good targets for clinical intervention.